The epidemiological literature suggests that virus transmission occurs only when individuals are in relatively close contact. We show that if society can control the extent to which economic agents are exposed to the virus and agents can commit to contracts, virus externalities are local, and...

Recent research documents that aggregate stock prices are driven by shocks with persistence levels ranging from daily intervals to several decades. Building on these insights, we introduce a parsimonious equilibrium model in which regime-shifts of heterogeneous durations affect the volatility of...

We study the role of information in asset pricing models with long-run cash flow risk. When investors can distinguish short- from long-run consumption risks (full information), the model generates a sizable equity risk premium only if the equity term structure slopes up, contrary to the data. In...

This paper presents a dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with a single friction in all markets: sticky information. In this economy, agents are inattentive because of costs of acquiring, absorbing and processing information, so that the actions of consumers, workers and firms are slow...

Perhaps the most important change of the last century was the great expansion of life itself -- in the US alone, life expectancy increased from 48 to 78 years. Recent economic estimates confirm this claim, finding that the economic value of the gain in longevity was on par with the value of...

The paper discusses prior elicitation for the parameters of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, and provides a method for constructing prior distributions for a subset of these parameters from beliefs about the moments of the endogenous variables. The empirical application...

We study the effects of on-the-job skill accumulation on average hours worked by age and the volatility of hours over the life cycle in a calibrated general equilibrium model. Two forms of skill accumulation are considered: learning by doing and on-the-job training. In our economy with learning...

We examine the relationship between monetary-policy-induced changes in short interest rates and yields on long-maturity default-free bonds. The volatility of the long end of the term structure and its relationship with monetary policy are puzzling from the perspective of simple structural...

Portfolio-based general equilibrium models are useful for analyzing the interaction between the structure of individual tax rates and the wayparticular assets are taxed, for considering the role of differential tax rules and risk in determining household portfolio choices, and for addressing...

We build a life cycle model of labor supply that incorporates changes along both the intensive and extensive margin and use it to assess the consequences of changes in tax and transfer policies on equilibrium hours of work. We find that changes in taxes have large aggregate effects on hours of...